17 Years Later ... Less Scary, But More Disturbing

Rating: 8/10 (27 June 2019)

Sometimes an experience of watching a film outweighs the quality of the film itself. The first time I saw 28 Days Later ... might have been one of those. My wife and my friend Andy saw it at a late night showing in the wonderful Stratford Picture House in the East End of London on a summer's night in 2002, in the first week of its release. A packed cinema was scared to within an inch of itself; Andy cycled home alone through London's by then deserted streets, a journey he still talks about with the hushed tones of one who never quite felt safe the whole journey. The next morning, England played bitter rivals Argentina in the football World Cup in Japan/South Korea; London came to a standstill during the game, during which my wife drove through empty streets to a meeting; streets eerily reminiscent of the film's famous scenes. Since then the film has acquired near-mythic status for me; a film by my favourite director that was so good and so frightening I couldn't revisit it.
Until this day in 2019, a whole 17 years later. It's remarkable how much of the film I could remember clearly - it really had imprinted itself on me. The post-prologue scenes of Cillian Murphy's character wondering an empty central London remain astonishing and chilling; and as throughout the film, we are reminded here that Danny Boyle is a director who really knows how to use music. The atmosphere of dread is palpable, a sense that is more long-lasting and all-encompassing than the many effectively executed jump scares. Whilst the low budget is occasionally uncomfortably visible, the skewed camera angles and deliberately disordered shot compositions add to a sense of disorientation and surreality. The film is questioning: what's normal anyway? Who gets to say?
Harries and Murphy are both excellent in the central roles; Christopher Eccleston's accent is further disorienting to those familiar with him from other work, throwing us further off centre when the reveal of his group's real agenda finally comes. Whilst the script does creak and strain under expository weight on occasions, the most disturbing moment comes in Eccleston's "Slow down" aside to one of his men, the moment it starts to dawn on viewer and protagonist alike how far humanity has fallen in little more than a month, how completely the 'normal' order of things has broken down. These revelations, and the moment when Harries' character watches the wrath executed by Murphy's in the film's closing action sequences (a final act shot through with the tropes of slasher and haunted house movies) point to something else, something we might now term concern about toxic masculinity. In the film's coda, Murphy whispers to Harries, sewing the dress she'd been earlier forced to wear, 'You know, you looked alright in that'; he may not be Infected, but it's possible he carries a similar virus. There are strong suggestions throughout that the Infected look for revenge on the living, but there's enough suggested in sub-text throughout the film to leave us wondering who the really dangerous ones are.
The legacy of this film is significant. It consolidated Murphy and Harries as significant actors in their own right; it turned out to be at the forefront a rebooting of the zombie story to the forefront of popular culture, a wive we're still riding today; most importantly, it relaunched the stellar and varied career of Danny Boyle which was threatening to disappoint after the misfires of The Beach and A Life Less Ordinary. For that, I'm thankful - Danny Boyle's films have rarely failed to speak to me and change me. 17 years on from first viewing, this film did again; less scary, perhaps, but more disturbing and relevant to today's gender discourse than perhaps many of us realised.